Page 18: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 15, 1981)

Tracor Marine Awarded $8-Million Contract By

Rockwell International

Tracor Marine, Inc., a Fort

Lauderdale, Fla., subsidiary of

Tracor, Inc., has been awarded a fixed-price contract from Rock- well International to operate the vessel Ocean Energy Converter in support of the Department of En- ergy's Ocean Thermal Energv

Conversion (OTEC) Program. The contract is for two years with an approximate value of $8 million, with operations for two addition- al years.

Moored off the island of Hawaii in 4,000 feet of water, the 525- foot vessel and its 2,200-foot-long gimbaled pipe bundle will be the platform from which several pro- totype megawatt heat exchangers will be tested.

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OTEC is a promising alternate energy scheme presently being developed by the Department of

Energy. The basic principle is to use the temperature difference between the warm surface waters and the cold deep waters avail- able in tropical latitudes to evap- orate and condense a working fluid such as ammonia. The en- ergy of expansion derived during the evaporation process can be used to drive a turbine for elec- trical power generation.

Although the vessel will be moored, all systems will be opera- tional as the ship's special thrust- ers will be used to counteract the force of variable currents at the site. Approximately 50 crew mem- bers and management and sup- port personnel will be involved in operating and monitoring the vessel and various onboard test systems.

Tracor Marine has played a key role in pioneering efforts to har- ness the vast wealth of the oceans for many years. Taking over the operation of the largest OTEC test platform in this new techno- logical area represents another of the firm's involvement in such ef- forts. Tracor, Inc. is an interna- tional technological products and services company headquartered in Austin, Texas.

IBM Awarded $3.6-Million

Navy Contract For Sonar

System Components

International Business Ma- chines Corporation, FSD, Manas- sas, Va., has been awarded a $3,628,375 modification to a pre- viously awarded contract for long lead materials for the AN/BQQ-6 sonar system. Work will be per- formed in Manassas, Va., and

Owego, N.Y. The Naval Sea Sys- tems Command was the contract- ing activity. (N00024-78-C-6189)

At joint meeting of ASNE Golden Gate Section and SNAME Northern California

Section (L to R): Henry Olson, papers chairman, SNAME; Peter A. Fisher, author;

Grant C. Johnson, author; Thomas B. Cole, Section chairman, SNAME; and Capt.

Art Wardwell, USN, Section chairman, ASNE.

Joint SNAME/ASNE Meeting

Hears Report On SPC Coating

The annual Joint Meeting of

The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Northern

California Section, and the Amer- ican Society of Naval Engineers,

Golden Gate Section, was held re- cently at the Fleet Admiral Nim- itz Club, Treasure Island Naval

Station, Calif. A paper titled, "Evaluation of SPC Underwater

Coating on a Modern Container- ship," was presented by Peter

A. Fisher of Matson Navigation

Company, and Grant C. Johnson of International Paint Company (Calif.), Inc.

Hull surface roughness, bio- logical fouling, effect of rough- ness on propulsion power, and characteristics of self polishing copolymer (SPC) coatings that help prevent fouling and limit in- crease of roughness over the life of the ship, were discussed in the first part of the paper.

The second part dealt with a trial application of an SPC coat- ing, supplied by the International

Paint Company, on the Matson

Navigation containership Maui.

The performance of this ship was compared over a two-year period with performance of the Manu- lani, a very similar containership operated on the same route but coated with a conventional anti- fouling system. The paper con- cluded that, in spite of its much higher cost, the SPC system ap- peared cost effective because per- formance degradation (in terms of fuel consumption increase as a function of time since last dry- docking) was much less with the

SPC system than with the con- ventional antifouling system. 20 Maritime Reporter/Engineering News